DeviantArt is a website that has survived several generations of the internet because it does one thing, and it does it well: it allows artists to upload and share their work. That’s it! So it’s both funny and more than a little tragic to see how the site tried something new last week, only for it to be the worst imaginable and implemented in the dumbest possible way.
03:51
The new multiplayer maps in the Halo Infinite Winter update
Wednesday 4:38 p.m
The thing was AI-generated art, of course, something that sounds cool in theory, but it was in practice little else but a chance for tech idiots and scammers to steal art, pretend they are artists and/or working artists to rob their work.
While it’s popular with people unsolicited talking to you about how now is the best time to buy crypto, actual artists are generally appalled by the practice. Artists, the actual users, and the whole point of the site, were rightfully upset last week when DeviantArt published a blog post that read “Introducing DreamUp, an image generation tool based on your prompts that allows you to visualize almost anything you can imagine.”
That blog entrysupposedly an introduction to a service that allows users to “create” their own AI art on DeviantArt has to spend most of its time saying “actually it’s fine, that’s not terrible” because it knew in advance that a large number of users would take one look at the legal and ethical complications involved and say, “That’s terrible!”
But they went and did it anyway. And were forced to make changes to it after just a day out, after artists protested the ease with which AI art systems could so easily scratch their own works without accreditation or even their active consent. The most egregious example was every single piece of art being tagged across the site to be made available to AI systems for learning, and users had to manually go into their accounts and unsubscribe from every single image.
G/O Media may receive a commission
The manner in which prominent artists had to decide against it was also controversial style stolen (humans typing prompts in AI art use a variety of keywords like “imagination” but also stage names to mimic their style), but to do so they had to submit a form that would take days to process:
While the bulk opt-out system was quickly changed (too late for many as the damage would already be done!), the whole thing still sucks as an idea (You can’t even guarantee it will work!), and deep down, DeviantArt knows because they released an update which is still mostly about addressing user concerns
AI art comes from the same gripping, dehumanizing wheelhouse as crypto and NFTs, and you can see this in DeviantArt’s system, which isn’t there for the casual enjoyment of existing users, but as a way to make money. DreamUp allows a certain number of free “prompts” before users are banned…unless they are paid DeviantArt members. And if you do decide to pay, what do you get in return, aside from the satisfaction you get from undermining the very community you claim to be a part of? DeviantArt was kind enough to provide some examples of llamas:
These look like shit. Like something a bot account would have tried to sell me as an NFT in 2021. Throw all that straight in the trash.
